From what I understand, building a camera with a larger sensor requires correspondingly larger lenses, so I think the main reason for the small sensor size is to keep the camera size down.

Davis74

(2:41 AM, November 13, 2010)

Great website!The HS10 manual zoom ring was the tipping point for me. The motor driven ultra zooms are too slow, not intuitive and eat batteries. I wish someone would make an ultra zoom with a significantly larger CMOS sensor. I'd pay a couple hundred more.

Thanks for pointing that out, we missed the fact that the FZ100 does high speed movies, we'll get that fixed up.

Trepheag

(2:01 AM, October 21, 2010)

also FZ100 has High Speed Movie, and I saw a video on flickr at 220fps vs 240fps for hs10 (presumably at same resolutions), higher fps meaning smaller resolutions for bothanyway it says here 1000fps for hs10 versus None for fz100 (which is incorrect, fz100 can do at least 220fps HSM)

Trepheag

(1:55 AM, October 21, 2010)

that is 25% more zoom, not 60% more zoomif 24x is 100% then 30x is 125%, namely if 6x zoom 25% then 4 times 25% is 100% aka 4x6=24x and so another 6x is another 25% which means 30x is 25% more zoom :)